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lapser

855 karma · joined April 3, 2022

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lapser··on Find a B Corp
To be clear, I did not write my comment to discredit the entire system. B-Corp is certification is the best thing we have to make these decisions a little easier on the consumer.

I made the comment to make people aware that it should still be looked at with caution, as corporations are going to try to game the system.

lapser··on Find a B Corp
> Now it feels like many companies have made attempts to conform to the standards, which is no simple feat, especially for multi-nationals.

You're right, actually conforming to the standard is no easy feat, but luckily, you can do the bare minimum[0] and continue your greenwashing processes.

[0] https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/find-a-b-corp/company/nes...

lapser··on Using Nginx to block Meta, Twitter and ChatGPT access to your sites
If they'd be that malicious, they could also change their bot's UA, so would it really matter?
lapser··on Is Google reCAPTCHA GDPR Compliant?
A long time ago, I was still in college (UK college, i.e., pre-university), and still learning.

I discovered a classmate was involved in some event, and found the event's website. They didn't have a captcha. By your logic, this was the right choice.

In reality, my dumb ass decided it would be fun to script something that would register millions of users (another classmate ran the script with me). After a few hundred thousand registration, the website was brought to its knees. I was a bit shook, but didn't think much of it.

Next morning I come into class, and was reprimanded by my teacher. Turns out, the owner of said event had threatened to sue the school and me, among other things. What had happened was their servers were down, their email server was brought to its knees, their web servers had died, and generally I had caused a lot of damage without even thinking about it. It caused them to potentially lose some money. None of this was my intention, of course, but I didn't know much better.

Point is, kids will kid, and spammers will spam. There are plenty of bots that just scrape the internet and fill out forms indiscriminately.

Captcha may or may not be the best option here (I'm always of the opinion it's not, especially not reCAPTCHA), but something has to be put in place, even if to stop the majority of bad actors.

lapser··on Email proves Microsoft's Activision bid is designed to eliminate Playstation
There's nothing wrong with that. VSCode will certainly have a lot more development that a fork would ever see. So the best thing to do here is simply build VSCode with all proprietary stuff removed.
lapser··on Terraform Cloud pricing quietly changed to per resource per hour
I could be wrong, but I don't see any announcements anywhere on the price change.
lapser··on Reddit goes down fully as thousands of subreddits protest API changes
None of these clients filter ads. They just return the API results. Reddit could have in theory returned ads and blocked clients who didn't (or required them to pay some/more money). Instead, they decided to charge extortionate amounts, essentially causing 3rd party apps to be unable to afford them.

It's very obvious their aim isn't necessarily charging, they're more interested in getting rid of 3rd party clients so that people would be forced to use their horrendous app. As a company, they have a right to go towards that route, but they should just say that.

lapser··on Fark redesign is now live (2007)
But a complete revamp doesn't necessarily mean bad UI/UX. It just means something different. It can be done in an equally good or better way. In comparison, the Reddit UI was just horrendous. It's barely usable. Without old.reddit or 3rd party apps, I would have probably stopped using Reddit by now due to how horrendous it is to use.
lapser··on Fark redesign is now live (2007)
Why is it that companies go towards bad UX when they start ramping up profits? Download size is one thing, but ignoring that, how is it that they thought the new (Reddit) website was a good idea? Sure it's mobile friendly, but it's barely useable on mobile and desktop? For example: why do I have to constantly click read more?

This seems to be a common thing with all kinds of companies, Digg, Facebook, many others. It's not like you can't build ads into the current site, right? Tracking can be easily built-in these days. Sure it'll decrease initial download speeds, but the UX won't be as terrible as what they keep coming up with.

lapser··on Archive your Reddit data before it's too late
I just get a page not found.
lapser··on Why I recommended ECS instead of Kubernetes to my latest customer
> DNS, ALB and TLS certs could be easily handled from just a few lines of Terraform, and nobody needs to touch it ever again.

Welcome to reality, where this is not the case.

I'm currently working at a company where we're using TF and ECS, and app specific infra is supposedly owned by the service developers.

In reality, what happens is devs write up some janky terraform, potentially using the modules we provide, and then when something goes wrong, they come to us cos they accidentally messed around with the state or whatever. DNS records change. ALB listener rules need to change.

lapser··on Why I recommended ECS instead of Kubernetes to my latest customer
Assuming you're joking, ECS here stands up Elastic Container Service.
lapser··on Why I recommended ECS instead of Kubernetes to my latest customer
I find it really wild that anyone would ever recommend ECS. A developer deploying a service involves:

- Setting up certs (managed as TF) - Setting up ALBs (managed as TF) - Setting up the actual service definition (often done as a JSON, that is passed into TF)

Possibly other things I'm forgetting.

Some other things. It requires a *developer* to know about certs and ALBs and whatever else.

With EKS, this can all be automated. The devops engineer can set it up so that deploying a service automatically sets up certs, LBs etc. Why are we removing such good abstractions for a proprietary system that is *supposed* to be less management overheads, when in reality, it causes devs to do so much more, and understand so much more?

lapser··on UK to crack down on plant-based food and drink labels
> you know exactly what it is

But you don't though, do you? "Vegan cheese" isn't cheese. Instead, it's a bunch of ingredients to make it feel and taste like cheese, but it's not cheese. Often it doesn't feel or taste like it, it barely comes close, and they can be worse for your health than cheese itself might be.

For milk alternatives, it's even worse. It's just a money printing machine. Much higher profit margins compared to milk for some lies and a vastly inferior taste and less nutrition.

Don't get me wrong, I've reduced my dairy intake considerably, so I'm all for dairy alternatives, but these companies are on the border of lying, and governments need to take action against them.

lapser··on “Tinder for Canceling Meetings”
This is inherently not the same, though. Sure, companies come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but a company's first and foremost interest is profit for the shareholder. For a person in a relationship, it's about finding a partner that makes them happy. In addition, you are expendable to a company, whereas people build a relationship and become more and more invested over time. Way more than a company becomes invested in an employee.
lapser··on Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
Sorry, no dice. It isn't, at least not intentionally.
lapser··on Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
> The tiny FM transmitter is surprisingly powerful. Her neighbours (of similar vintage) are very happy too, so their requests have also started coming in :)

Sounds like you're about to start a Radio station for the nation.

lapser··on Show HN: Kinde – auth, feature flags and billing (Q3) in one integration
If not for the brand difference, it should be done to avoid Amazon's lawyer from coming after you.
lapser··on Show HN: Kinde – auth, feature flags and billing (Q3) in one integration
> 10k M2M tokens for $250/month sounds like a really bad deal if I can just spin up https://github.com/ory/hydra that can easily handle 10k requests per second.

Spinning one up is easy, sure. Making sure it's production ready, is not so much.

lapser··on Linux desktop leaders unite behind Flathub app store. Here's why
Maybe it's because I'm naive when it comes to Nix, but so far everything Nix related I've seen requires some file configuration that no everyone is able to keep up with. Compare that to having a GUI frontend and a simple `flatpak install ..` command.

Flatpak is not just easier for packagers, it's miles ahead when it comes to simplicity for end users.

lapser··on We will not ‘walk out’ of UK, nor comply with any request to bypass encryption
> Try to access thepiratebay.org or other pirate sites, or other sites that the UK gov deems inappropriate (CP obviously), etc.

I don't know about the "other sites", but tpb isn't part of any "Great Firewall". It's just ISPs have been required to update their DNS servers to _not_ resolve the DNS record. Even then, there are still quite a few ISPs that have not implemented it. It's why changing your DNS servers to something like Google or Cloudflare means you can easily access tpb.

So blocked websites in the UK are nowhere near on the same level as the Great Firewall.

My guess is those other sites are a bit more sophisticated, or if not, ISPs are willing to comply easier.

lapser··on Docker-OSX: Run macOS VM in a Docker
This is a regular VM. Specially it's qemu-kvm. The difference being that this is running qemu-kvm inside a container (remember, containers are mostly just processes). The advantage this gives you is that your run command is much simpler than the alternative.
lapser··on ReVanced DMCA Takedown on GitHub
If I'm reading this[0] correct, according to GitHub it includes that too.

[0] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/content-removal-polic...

lapser··on If PHP Were British (2011)
According to Wikipedia[0], using "ise" is still the British spelling, as well as Australian spelling. However, the Oxford spelling of these words are using "ize".

After a customary search, I can't seem to find any sources that suggest using "ise" might be French, and made popular by British newspapers, besides the below Wikipedia article claiming newspapers using the "ise" spelling, instead of "ize". I'd love to see some sources on this if you have any.

I grew up in Britain, and have been spelling using the "ise" version, but since I've started working for a US company, I've started using "ize" everywhere since it's just easier. In addition, it's still accurate British, when using the Oxford spelling. Although, it did take me a while to get accustomed to changing my writing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling

lapser··on Jqjq: Jq Implementation of Jq
It is indeed a reimplementation of jq in go, and the reason I use it over jq is many, one of which is that it produces more helpful error messages. In fact, I've moved jq to ojq (sometimes I want to check compatibility), and ln -fs gojq jq.
lapser··on Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days
The arguments against 4-day work weeks are slowly eroding, and I'm here for it.
lapser··on Proposed class action alleges that Apple tracks users despite privacy assurances
That's a device specific identifier. That's not labelling users on device.
lapser··on Proposed class action alleges that Apple tracks users despite privacy assurances
> Apple is doing the labeling of its users on device

Do you have a source for this?

lapser··on Reclaiming Mobile Privacy with GrapheneOS
I have been using GrapheneOS since April. I have not used any alternatives in a long time (my previous phone was the Galaxy S9):

First, let me preface this with the fact that, in my opinion, overall it's a pretty solid OS. After having done research several times, the only other mod I've considered is LineageOS, but last I checked, there were no builds for my Pixel 6 Pro.

My biggest two issues with it are that it doesn't have any usability improvements other mods have. It's not on them though, as it's an expectation I have of mods, but obviously this is like having an expectation of support for FLOSS. It's annoying, but it is what it is.

The default camera app is subpar compared to the stock camera app of Pixel phones. I use OpenCamera, but it's also not great (though that opinion might stem from me not knowing how to use it properly).

The bigger issue I have with it is that, while sandboxed Google services generally work pretty well, some apps don't work properly with the location requests proxy. I'd love to enable it, but, for example, Citymapper is unable to track me when I use it. Finding a location sometimes can take very long.

I would love to have LineageOS improved by having the hardening patches that are in GrapheneOS.

lapser··on Playstation VR2
> Privacy options

Are we talking about the same Meta company that owns Facebook?

> they -removed- Facebook login

Which they added in the first place, much to the dismay of literally everyone.

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